AI isn't like any other historical tool or technology. Its qualitatively different. Flint axes or waterwheels or a plasma torches dont just suddenly appear everywhere, and then start getting rapidly (and likely recursively) better at the thing they do. While also mimicking innate human characteristics like complex language.
Its the rate of change.
Trains. Building railroads made everything faster, including building faster trains, which facilitated making cars and trucks, which facilitated airplanes, etc.
Fairly sure that even today if you memory wipe all knowledge of trains and train building (including road trains, like in Australia) and vaporize all railroads, locomotives, rail wagons, train stations, etc, it would set us back 50 years.
To use an analogy, you can use a goat as a lawnmower - it'll keep the grass down for you. You could maybe even train it so it keeps it a specific length, but it's a goat - there's always a chance it will jump the fence or headbutt you or something else. It's an animal, not a tool. You can use AI as a tool, but that doesn't make it a tool.
Yes AI is arguably still software, but we have never seen programs with anything close to this level of flexibility and adaptability in software.
As another analogy, there's nothing special about neurons- their characteristics are broadly known and researchers have been able to simulate small numbers of them in computer models. However, when you have enough of them in the right structure, complex behaviours are possible which are never exhibited at the lower levels. There's nothing majorly different between the neurons in brains of a chimp and a human, but the capabilities and meta-capabilities are wildly different.
I think we see a similar step-change with generative AI systems.